“The only way it even conceivably can work is to give young poor kids the same sort of boost up that young affluent kids get, which is to make sure these kids get an excellent preschool education, make sure these kids get tutoring, make sure these parents know at what time in the circuit they are supposed to prepare their kids for what. And that is taking on a much larger task than tinkering with a test.”
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I disagree. I believe in education. I think they should raise expectations in the everyday classrooms. No one is too destroyed by kindergarten or first grade that they can't be taught. I think you can take a kid at age five with no previous academics and begin giving them a good education. Apparently it must be harder in the real world than it is in my thoughts.
In my thoughts there is a great education available at any level. There are skills and content that will progressively raise the ability from any level to another level. If you feed the knowledge at the students level they will increase their appetite, and strength. I'm liking that analogy from this forum that compares educating a person with feeding that person.
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Some teachers at P. S. 163 use the word “enriched,” rather than “accelerated,” to describe the academics of the gifted programs.
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This is part of the problem. Schools want to entertain kids more than educate them. A good education would make studying interesting and rewarding in and of itself. The focus should be on getting an education if you are going to school. Would it help to make that very clear?
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“In the gifted classrooms that I’ve been in, the majority of kids are reading at grade level or beyond, and they can write well, and then so much time is not spent on basic skills so they can spend more time on content and on comparing historical eras,” Professor Folsom said. “They are then able to do the more deep thinking work because less time has to be spent on the fundamental skills.”
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See?! Quit trying to be engaging and start teaching. But then I remind myself that it must be harder than I thought or we wouldn't be reading about these problems.
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She said her experience was that many of the children in her general education classes were at grade level or below and did not get the same support from their parents that the children in the gifted classes got. “They’re tougher kids,” she said of the general education students in the school. “They’re very street-savvy. They don’t have the background; their parents are hard on them but don’t know what to do with them.”
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Well, that's why they send them to school. If the parents are tough on the kids then the teachers should be too. They should be selling the kids on education by raising the bar and showing the kids in the short term what a good education can accomplish. See how much your skills have grown?! Who wouldn't want to be smarter?
If the G&T classes are working well for some families, and the general education classes are said to be failing other families, why don't they fix those classes? Every article posted here is beating that same drum, "That school is better, not everyone can have it. Destroy the school." Why do these articles never say, "That school has what more people want. There's not enough to go around. Let's copy it."
I hate to say, but the schools don't really know how to teach the gifted or the disadvantaged. It's because they want to give everybody the same amount of time in school.
I really hate saying this, because it's all been said before. . ability grouping, acceleration, failing a grade and repeating. These are the most obvious answers for a school system to give an education. Honestly, the online, adaptable, far-reaching education options that are only getting better seems to have more potential for a universally better education.
